WELS Statistical Report: Birth Rates

(A continued discussion on the WELS Statistical Report)

What wasn't shown directly in Hein's report is the precipitous dropoff from 2010 to 2019 - a 30% decline in children over ten years. Then we see in a single year from 2019 to 2020 a decline of 37% with no signs of recovery as of 2023. Since a child spends nine months in the womb gestating it's difficult to assign that drop in fertility to COVID, which was not in full swing until March. The trailing indicator of COVID influence on births would be November 2020.

It seems like we have a pretty severe problem on our hands. So, what should we do? Might I suggest the following three things 

1. We need to repent of not talking about birth control. We need to repent of throwing our children to the wolves in the name of The Great Commission by sending our youth to public schools, denying the importance of a Lutheran education - one of the WELS' great heritages! However even if all those WELS kids stayed in WELS schools, we would need to repent of a twisted sense of mission in terms of inviting heathens and heterodox into our schools. We'd also need to repent of modern educational techniques like SEL that are counterscriptural. But as Jon Hein told us, four of the five reasons for having the heathen and heterodox in our schools is for those sweet school choice dollars! And in order to do that we need to fit in with the worlds' educational standards.

We have a lot of repenting to do!

2. Second maybe we can throw a bone to the church growth movement and start a new program called "church growth (it begins in the bedroom)". Maybe Novotny can drag an old brass over-stuffed bed out on stage and use it as a prop for a sermon series. Historically the church grew because the family grew and it seems that because the family isn't growing we resorted to bringing an outsiders - opening our southern border, so to speak.

3. The third thing we can do is kick the contemporary crap to the curb once and for all. We know that the reason people stay in church is because the father attends church:

 We know the reason many men do not stay in church is because the modern Lutheran church, in many of its instantiations, is effeminate. We sing hymns that sound more like love songs than confession of Faith, we have preaching that is littered with illustrations poking at sins of the heart more than sins of action, we tell our young men the anger is wrong in all cases, to quote CS Lewis we castrate the geldings and bid them be fruitful! 

We don't need any kind of fake manliness course, we don't need Lutheran leadership, what we need is pastors that preach law and gospel firmly and clearly, pastors willing to call out the culture and call out the sins that have invaded our families. The arrows a father takes for his family should be taken by the spiritual father of the church. The pastor needs to back the father up to build up the family. We need the liturgy to keep us on the rails and we need to sing those old Lutheran chorales that should be played like marches instead of dirges. As individual Christians we are masculine in the pursuit it is a war against the devil the world in our sinful flesh. As the Bride of Christ it is a feminine pursuit in that we submit to our Savior as a woman submits to her husband and we receive the gifts that the man brings to the relationship. But this doesn't mean our worship has to be effeminate this doesn't mean our hymnody needs to be contemporary and lovey-dovey. 

If you capture the father, the family follows. This has been the case throughout church history. The jailer at Phillipi converts and then so does his household The leader of a country converts and so does his citizens. Yes, faith is individual, but when a leader converts the followers follow. That's human nature as God made it. 

Patriarchy is baked into the cake.